Cuba

The holiday to Cuba came in the middle of what feels like another holiday: school has finished and we are on holiday painting murals, sorting out things for the next PT volunteers, helping out with groups, hanging out with friends, making cakes, and swimming in the river.

And so, the six of us DR Project Trust volunteers set off to Cuba for a holiday…

‘Socialism o Muerte’ was the message that greeted us painted onto the side of an old warehouse as we drove out of Havana airport on Thursday morning . This is going to be a good holiday.

Cuba really does feel like the land that time forgot. We spent the first few days of our two week stay in Cuba surrounded by crumbling colonial buildings, hectic cobbled streets, cigars, beautiful old cars, peso pizzas and live music coming from every café.

Cuba is rapidly turning into a land of visual contrasts; new mixing with old where ever you look. Shiny new imported cars cross ancient train tracks where rusty carriages from the ‘60s squeak and grumble from one side of the city to the other; teenagers in flashy sunglasses and edgy hair styles sit at the wheels of ancient classic cars; and bijou privately run cafes nestle between old state-run businesses. With trade restrictions beginning to be lifted and the tight-fisted embargos loosening their grip Cuba is slowly coming out of the 50s. The thing is that despite the ancient technology and crumbling buildings that have been part of life for the past 60 years Cuba can confidently compete on the world stage in terms of its health care system and education. From talking to people in shops, restaurants and in the street the result of the focus put on education by the government is marked.  Unlike in the Dominican Republic most people can hold a fairly comprehensive conversation with you in English, and when you attempt to talk about something that is happening outside of Cuba they tended to know more than you do. One of the first things that Castro did when he took power was to promote education across the country. Wherever you lived be it in Central Havana or deep in the mountains there would be a school that you could get to. Moreover the concept of private education is alien in Cuba meaning that the child of the bank manager learns alongside the child of the mechanic. The message that this sends out is that just because someone (or more accurately someone’s parents) has money does not mean that they deserve a better start in life and instead of being cushioned and sheltered, children meet other children from a range of backgrounds.  By channelling a large proportion of (frankly, compared to countries such as the UK, fairly limited) state funds into education the government has created schools that provide some of the best education in the world regardless of social class. Maybe an example that the notoriously elitist education system in UK should take on board. By prioritising areas such as education when Fidel Castro took power it now means that the literacy rate in Cuba rose from between 60-76% in 1959 to 99.8%. The idea that the first thing that a government does when it takes power is to build schools, train teachers, invest in health and establish a social welfare system that can rival any in the developed world puts my faith back into humanity. They weren’t interested in pleasing private enterprise to enhance the wealth of the wealthiest or waffle about being there for ordinary people while behind the scenes filling their own pockets they just did what any government should do and looked after the people. They invested in people and in the future. Today Cuba trains 20,000 more doctors than the whole of Africa and has one of the highest number of doctors per head of the population of any country in the world.

Our trip started in Havana where, after a couple of crazy music filled nights and hot days we travelled to the resting place of Che Guevara in Santa Clara and from there down to the film set-like streets of Trinidad. With a week left we headed to Cien Fuegos, the town liberated by Che, then out to the campo in Viñales where we watched cigar production and walked around the incredible valley before travelling back to Havana to finish our trip in style. Throughout the whole trip we stayed in ‘casas particulares’ which are people’s houses which they have opened up to travellers. People tend to earn more catering to tourists than they do in their day jobs and as a result there are ‘casas’ everywhere you look in Cuba. It’s a fantastic way to get a taste of Cuban life and means that you can actually talk and spend some time with real people. We met some great characters while we were staying in Casas, like Miguel in Santa Cara who whore trilby hats 24/7, our hostess in Cien Fuegos who is a lecturer in industrial engineering during the day, and Surama in Havana who is a doctor as her day job, who said that she drank rum in the morning ‘to help her varicose veins’ and looked after us like we were her children. All of the Casas that we stayed in were beautiful (other than the seemingly obligatory collection of creepy china dolls which stare at you from every side table); you start to wonder how people come to live in these amazing palaces. When we put the question to Miguel in Santa Cara he explained that until now buying and selling houses in Cuba was nearly impossible which meant that all of the houses that we stayed hat had been passed down through the generations. 

Speaking to real Cubans you start to realise the challenges of living in Cuba. The most obvious difficulty is the dual currency; Nationals (the local currency) and kooks (the tourist currency). Nationals are practically worthless compared to Kooks which means that a doctor (who is paid in Nationals) can earn just as much by driving a cab round Havana for a night as they would from working a 24hr shift at the hospital. However the flip side to this is that getting an education and a good job becomes less about the money and material wealth that you will gain by the end of it and more about doing what you actually want to do. From talking to people there seems to be less of a greed for money and position. People genuinely seem to want to help each other and the community in which they live. However, with the changing economic infrastructure, abolishment of Nationals, the rise of private enterprise and the easing of trade barriers the question remains as to how people will react. The abolishment of Nationals could sign a better future for Cuba with people earning more for the work that they do; however the question remains whether  people will retain the community spirit that has been fostered since the revolution or will the greed that rules us in the West slowly seep into communities and people’s attitudes.

One of the most interesting people who we talked to was our hostess in Havana. She said that by running the Casa for tourists she earns more than she does at the hospital and from talking to her and her family we learned that the general opinion is that the changes that are taking place in Cuba are having a positive effect on society and are opening up people’s horizons and opportunities. 

Staying in Havana was a beautiful, surreal and overwhelming way to be thrown into Cuba. The buzz of Cuban life hummed from every back street and pulsed through the air like electricity (which is, by the way, available 24/7 unlike some neighbouring countries…) Kids kicked footballs through car-less streets. The main pedestrian street however was packed with hundreds of tourists, souvenir shops, peso pizza stands and restaurants. In the mid-day heat (35 degrees plus) this close hot environment felt fairly oppressive and so we stuck mainly to the winding back streets, dodging bicycle taxis, while people shouted to each other from top floor windows overhead. Between wandering, site-seeing and taking rides around the city in taxies from the 60s we had plenty to keep us occupied.

In search of food one night we ended up in a restaurant situated in a guy’s front room. To get to the small living room which had balconies looking over the main street we walked through the kitchen where his sister prepared food and drinks. The Virgin Mary watched us from the wall as we drank and family photographs were stuck to the fridge. Private enterprise is just starting in Cuba and small privately owned cafes and restaurants are starting to spring up next to state run businesses as people take advantage of the changing economy. One evening in Havana we found ourselves wandering along the Malecon (a long promenade which snakes long the coast and separates Havana from the sea). People sat, chatted, played music and sang. We were joined by a group of guys and their guitar and we danced and talked until the early hours of the morning. When we asked them about life in Cuba they didn’t give much away, ‘it’s ok’, and ‘it’s good’. We discovered that Cubans can’t have Facebook and that internet access is limited. Censorship is another issue that dictates people’s freedom of speech. There is no real opposition to the government which controls the press and television channels meaning that freedom of speech in compromised and guys like the ones we met on the Malecon are restricted in what they can even say to us let alone publish publicly. Our stay in Havana left a lot for us to think about but our trip had hardly begun.

The coach journeys between all the cities were some of the strangest of my life. As you roll out of the city the numbers of cars on the roads become fewer and fewer and the pot holes became closer and closer together. We drove along deserted highways dotted with wooden farm buildings, palm trees and sugar cane plantations. The only other traffic other than the occasional old car coughing along were old men in straw hats riding ancient push bikes cigars firmly gripped between their lips and sugar cane strapped to the rack on the back of their bike. We also saw lots of horse drawn carts transporting people and produce between towns. We were informed later in the trip that most people can’t afford the new cars that are slowly being imported from the west and that the passed down classics can’t make the three hours from one city to the next. The result of this is eerie highways filled with the sound of the clopping of hooves and the creaking of old bicycle frames bouncing along the potholed tarmac.

After the ghost ride from Havana we arrived hot and tired in Santa Clara where we were picked up from the bus station by a horse drawn taxi! My heart sank, I thought it was just a touristy gimmick that the casa owner thought we would enjoy. However, as we clopped through the main streets I quickly realised that cars were few and far between. The streets were busy with horse drawn carts, people giving each other lifts on rusty bicycles, and ancient buses from the 60s which creaked and puffed to a stop at bus stops outside low rise apartment buildings where horses grazed on the front greens and kids bounced footballs off the walls. In both Santa Clara and Cien Fuegos bicycles were everywhere, boyfriends gave girlfriends backies and long legged school children raced each other down along the streets. Everywhere you looked felt like a scene from a 50s movie.

From the Cuban-ness of Santa Clara we were transported to the film set-like winding streets of Trinidad. Trinidad was possibly the quaintest place that we visited: with its brightly coloured buildings and classic cars it felt like something out of a story book. During our stay we took a trip out to a valley just outside of the city where, during the slave trade, huge sugar plantations had been worked by saves brought from Africa. A watch tower soared above the town where men in straw hats smoking cigars sat outside wooden-slatted buildings and cowboys on horseback rode down the hot streets. Even in small rural towns like this just standing next to people and listening to conversations was surprising.  We passed a group of stall holders sewing together lace table cloths and taking about the variation in education levels between their town and the neighbouring Trinidad and how that affects their children. No discussion of rice and beans or the latest tele novela here!

Next on the itinerary was Cien Fuegos. Cien Fuegos felt very Cuban and wandering down the back streets of the town there was a lot of ‘I love you baby’, ‘like your body’, ‘pssst marry me’ etc. etc. which somewhat shattered the illusion that Cuban men are less creepy than Dominicans - was it too much to hope for!? It provided (as it always does) a lot of hilarity and made us feel like we were back in the DR.

The journey to Viñales was the longest we had: six hours to Havana then another three to Viñales . During this time we had numerous opportunities to experience the terrifying toilet women. Now, I haven’t mentioned the banshees of the baños up to this point but I feel that the time is right. Pubic bathrooms (or baño in Spanish) in Cuba are all manned (or wommaned?) by very scary Cuban ladies. Imagine the situation; you have just leapt of the bus, battled your way through the crowed, hot service or bus station where there is a fair amount of ‘taxi lady, I give you good price’ing, you’re bursting for a wee, your reach the bathroom to find a fairly solid, middle aged Cuban lady planted firmly in the entrance of the bathroom. As you try to sneak past a hand flies out to block your path and you brace yourself for the inevitable ‘hay que pagar’ (‘you have to pay’) at the same time you get the sinking feeling as you realise… you have no change! When you try to challenge the fact that you are being asked to pay to use  bathroom which looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since the revolution and which NEVER has any toilet paper you are told (with the accompanying death stare) that ‘you have to pay in every country in the world’. With that you have options either risk certain death, defy scary baño woman and march confidently past. You could run back to the bus for change even though it may be gone by the time you get back from the bathroom or jut cross your legs for another couple of hours until the next terrifying encounter.

After a number of these scary encounters we arrived safely in Viñales, a beautiful valley where huge tables of rock jutted out of the flat floor. This is the land of cigar and coffee production and we took a trip to a tobacco farm where the owner showed us round the huge thatched drying shed and let us try some of his cigars. Being a national park the farms in Viñales are prohibited from using chemicals and machinery meaning that all the work has to be done by hand or animal. Huge oxen marched up the rutted tracks and pulled ancient ploughs through the fields. The landscape looked like somewhere in Asia rather than the Caribbean. Sitting on the roof of the Casa we watched thunder storms roll in every evening across the valley. Forked lightning and deafening thunder were regular sounds at about five in the afternoon.  Heads full of smoke and sun we travelled back to Havana from Viñales where we spent an excellent last couple of days soaking up the last drops of live Cuban music and rum before our flight home.

Now, onto the flight fiasco: we got to the airport for 6.30am ready to check in for our flight at 9.40 that morning. After not seeing the flight on the departures board we enquired at the Cubana airlines desk only to be told that it had been delayed until 7 that evening. We hadn’t been able to check the flight times due to the lack of internet access in Cuba meaning that twelve long hours stretched before us. However after a fair amount of faffing we, alongside the other passengers who had missed the memo, we were treated to an afternoon in a four star hotel where we circled the breakfast buffet an impressive thirteen times between us, had baths (first one in eleven months!) and relieved the hotel of all the free soap and shampoo that we could get our hands on. It was a very strange way to end our Cuban holiday. Although it was a hilarious experience I’m glad we weren’t paying guests. Looking out of the window over the crumbling houses on the edge of Havana it was hard to imagine any of the amazing people that we had met staying in a place like that. In the gift shop they sold huge posters of Che Guevara and you couldn’t help thinking about what he would make of this: a huge plush private hotel catering to rich tourists on the outskirts of Havana. I get the feeling that he wouldn’t have been very impressed.

As we were driving back to the airport after our strange, surreal afternoon we passed the same sign that had greeted us as we entered the country; ‘Socialism ó Muerte’. On the pavement outside an old car was parked, bonnet up, its oily-handed owner prodding around its ancient innards as his passengers stared on with expressions that indicated that maybe this wasn’t the first time that the family car had given up the ghost. Looking at the broken down car under a relic from the revolution I couldn’t help wondering how long this amazing, difficult and complicated country has left before it changes for ever. For better or for worse the old Cuba, like the classic cars which have been iconic symbols for so many years is reaching the end of the road, and the path it takes will be watched by the whole world.